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Deon T. Benton

@deontbenton.bsky.social
3.8K followers 979 following 677 posts

Developmental cognitive scientist. Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University. Co-host of The It's Innate! Podcast. PI of the Computational Cognitive Development Lab. Dad. Husband. Human. (he/him/his)

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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 9h
Here's a fun question: If you had to estimate how many manuscript pages you've written to this point in your career -- be it for a journal article or chapter and published or published -- how many pages would that be?
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 16h
turns out that making an extremely detailed outline helps with motivation (especially when writing something as open-ended as a chapter)
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Lauren J. Myers @proflaurenmyers.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I’ll be presenting next week @btscon.bsky.social on integrating undergraduate students into big team science projects in an advanced course. Come check out my presentation on Tuesday 10/6 at 2pm Eastern!
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Anyone else like this? To get myself in the mood to write something, I like to read similar things. For example, I'm currently working on a chapter, and I'm struggling to find the motivation to write it. One thing that helps me find it is to read chapters written by my favorite scientists.
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Jenna (jennadistefano.bsky.social), our editor extraodinaire, is really killing it with her interviews! Take a listen to the second episode of her segment, "A conversation with a future luminary."
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
little over one month to knock out this invited chapter. ready. set. go!!
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Yeah -- this, and the other MB findings, have really got me thinking...
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Lauren J. Myers @proflaurenmyers.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Want a little distraction that can help me with a class demo in Intro Psych? Take a short (1-2 minute) color perception test at ismy.blue Then report your results in the google form below! I'll post a figure of results by gender and age later this week. 🙂 forms.gle/dPkMztpNLNQK...
ismy.blue
Is my blue your blue?
Test your color perception with this interactive test.
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I'm a little reticent to say this for fear of it backfiring but I think, for the first time ever, I'm all caught up on my reviewer assignments.
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
This is absolutely positively not a flex but please tell me I'm not the only prof who doesn't practice talks beforehand (mostly because too busy and don't begin building prezi until way too close to the talk)? A downside? Almost always I have too much content
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Ed Sheerain
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Looks very very interesting
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Michelle Greene @mgreenephd.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
🚨New paper alert! 🚨 The visual system tunes itself to the statistics of its input. How do individual experiences differently tune vision? In this work, @bjbalas.bsky.social and I examined how one individual difference—height—changes the visual diet and how this affects perception. 1/
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Crisis of the most epic proportions has been averted thanks to Katie (@ktvasq.bsky.social)!
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Anyone have access to the following reference? I've struck out. Hunter, M. A., & Ames, E. W. (1988). A multifactor model of infant preferences for novel and familiar stimuli. Advances in Infancy Research, 5, 69–95.
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Jamie Reilly 🦜 @reilly-coglab.com · 20/09/2026
My Op Ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer on the harms of cutting student supports and the tenuous state of financing American higher education www.inquirer.com/opinion/comm...
inquirer.com
How Temple University failed my daughter on her first day of college | Opinion
My daughter was collateral damage in an ongoing war for ever-higher enrollment numbers and was let down by an on-campus support system that has been weakened by extreme budget cuts.
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Little (Albert) Rascal
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
was really hoping to sleep tonight
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Lisa Fazio @lkfazio.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Phew, not a lawyer but glad my understandings are accurate. #1stAmmendment
Picture of round glasses and the text "Your rating is: Wonk

Congratulations, you are a First Amendment expert!

You answered 8 out of 8 questions correctly 9% of U.S. adults receive this score"
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
A tale as old as time
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Andy Pinedo @profandy.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Social sciences colleagues working on more critical topics (e.g., inequality, racism, collective action), how are we thinking about advising our PhD students around the NSF GRFP this cycle? Is it work the effort, any sense whether they will receive fair consideration? A lost cause at the moment?
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
I said it before, and I'll say it again: this has got to Stapel.
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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I wrote down my thoughts about the last several weeks of AI hell. aiguide.substack.com/p/misleading...
aiguide.substack.com
Misleading Metaphors, Real Risks
What To Fear from AI Agents and How to Reclaim Our Human Agency
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
So lovely to chat with my former postdoc mentor and to learn some new things about him! ;-)
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Jenny Wang 👶 🧮 @jinjingjenny1.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
seeking help 🆘 a senior colleague advised that i need to give more invited talks to strengthen my tenure case... how do i find such opportunities?
static.klipy.com
Wirt from Over The Garden Wall Looks Awkward
ALT: Wirt from Over The Garden Wall Looks Awkward
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Brandon Woo @brandonwoo.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
New paper with Liz Spelke, @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social, and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social! We find that when 4- to 6-month-old infants observe two individuals share saliva, they infer that those individuals have a close relationship. Free access link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1niQg_Oow0...
A conceptual schematic illustrating the logic of the studies. (A) Infants observe a central actor who shares saliva with one actor and does not share saliva with another actor. (B) From such observations, infants may infer and represent whether the actors are connected and how thick each connection is. (C) These representations support infants' expectations of who will respond to the central actor's distress.
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Associative learning strikes again
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Lovely, lovely paper, and even lovelier authors. Great work, Ashley (ashleyjthomas.bsky.social) and Brandon (brandonwoo.bsky.social). Even though I can’t say I’m convinced just yet, this is exactly the kind of challenge to our work that makes science fun. Stay tuned for a potential response. ;-)
ashleyjthomas.bsky.social
Ashley Thomas (@ashleyjthomas.bsky.social)
This profile requires authentication to view.
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
I do wonder when all of this data fraud will come to a Stapel.
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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 03/09/2026
Do you know the story of the infinitesimally small pirate? He walked the Planck
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Spoken like a true procrastinator "The documentary record I have at my disposal today about those experiments isn’t sufficient to answer the questions that have been raised, and more than two decades, and hundreds of experiments later, my memory is similarly insufficient."
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Lisa Fazio @lkfazio.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Yet again, very clear evidence of data fraud by Ariely. Waiting for the hundreds of articles and full court media press about how a top university is promoting the work of a fabulist. Cause that's what happens next right?? No differences in how some faculty are treated vs others???
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
I'm looking to write a registered report for the first time ever -- yes, really! -- and I'm wondering if anyone would be willing to share an example.
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
I couldn't be prouder of our editor-in-chief Jenna DiStefano (jennadistefano.bsky.social) for developing and leading this new series! Please give it a listen!
jennadistefano.bsky.social
Jenna DiStefano (@jennadistefano.bsky.social)
Dev Psych PhD candidate @ucdavis | studying the impact of spoken and sign language experience on cog dev 🧠🤟🏼 | formerly @upenn @vanderbilt
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Meltem Yucel @drmeltemyucel.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
I am truly honored to be one of the recipients of the SAGE Early Career Trajectory Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology! 🎊
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
I did my part. Did you?
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
"As academics, we are concerned that Ghent University's disciplinary proceedings against Dr Cofnas appear to constitute retaliation, at least in part, for publicizing academic misconduct that occurred in British universities." Talk about burying the fucking lede
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Tim Verstynen @tdverstynen.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
If you’re really concerned about online mobs “cancelling” academics, then you wouldn’t sign this. If you’re really concerned about the free and fair discussion of ideas, then you wouldn’t sign this. If you’re really just about flirting with “race realism” however…
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Congrats Rachel and my dear colleague Eric ericdwilkey.bsky.social
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
You have the world's simplest bar graph, one corresponding to the experimental condition, the other, to the control condition.* Should (A) the experimental bar be positioned to the left of the control bar; or (B) to its right? *there is a correct answer here
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
📖 What I'm reading this week McMurray, B. (2007). Defusing the childhood vocabulary explosion. Science, 317(5838), 631-631. Re-read this absolute classic by Bob McMurray showing that there's nothing special about the vocabulary spurt if by "special" you mean a mechanism specific to the spurt.
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Clare Conry-Murray, Ph.D. @cconrymurray.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Does anyone have suggestions for R packages or other resources for coding gender when it is an open-ended question?
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Hilary Barth @hilarybarth.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Job ad - please share! wesleyan.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/career...
wesleyan.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com
Lab Coordinator
The Cognitive Development Lab and the Reasoning and Decision Making Lab at Wesleyan University (Dr. Hilary Barth and Dr. Andrea Patalano) announce a full-time joint Lab Coordinator position. The Lab C...
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Yes!
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
I concur. Give it a listen.
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Jenna DiStefano @jennadistefano.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
I’m so honored to have been awarded the Duolingo Dissertation Research Grant! 🦉💚 My dissertation explores how language learning mechanisms (statistical learning) unfold across multiple populations of infants, children, and adults, including how attention and prior language experience shape learning.
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Being the ever-curious person that I am, I wonder if anyone would be willing to point me to *contemporary* arguments against a language network
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Deon T. Benton @deontbenton.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
as if I didn't already have all of these cool papers to read, Jenny and her colleagues go and publish yet more cool papers I have to read
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aaron bornstein @aaronbornstein.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
New lab paper! @noraharhen.bsky.social and @catehartley.bsky.social investigate how children and adolescents differ in their use of episodic context for decision-making. Thread below.
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Rebecca Peretz-Lange @rebeccaperetzlange.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
I've seen lots of chatter about how this paper finds that liberal profs don't push their students leftward, but not enough chatter IMO about how students do shift leftward in college regardless. Knowledge, not faculty pressure, moves people leftward! Shameless plug for my related recent paper 🤗⤵️
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